Unifying Science and Spirituality

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I’ve spent my life ignoring the fear that predators generate, offering love as a win-win alternative. But – being in the mode of fear – predators are good at simulation of it, and have taken up the strategy of marshaling social hostility by pretending to fear.

Predators operate in the brain stem. Yesterday, I decided to push them out. I have turned all the psychological discipline that allows me to create beauty in the face of anger, and isolated them in the lower part of my personality.

I now confidently traverse the places they have tried to ward against me, and upon encountering them in person offer a cheery “Good morning!” My mind is clear of the thoughts that they cultivated to justify their enmity.

Woken early this morning, I turned my focus on them – primitive personalities trapped in the amber of my will – and extended its boundaries, out to the criminal enterprise that has occupied the White House and the Kremlin, cauterizing the fear.

Shortly after I entered high school, mandatory busing brought students from the inner city out to the white haven of Woodland Hills. The lunch area was voluntarily segregated, black students in one corner set off from the milling WASPs and JAPs.

Busing was an attempt to address the social divide created by white flight from the city out to the Los Angeles suburbs. When my parents sold the family home in the ’90s, it was part of a progression that ceded the Valley to a growing Hispanic population as the Caucasians headed up the freeways to Camarillo, Palmdale, and Santa Clara.

In some part this was driven by real estate values: owners that once saw their houses as homes began to consider them to be assets, avoiding maintenance under the assumption that they could always trade up against their growing equity. Neighborhood blight was their legacy, allowing hard-working minorities in the trades the opportunity to profit from their sweat equity.

But a significant factor, visible in resegregation all across the country, was the desire to live among “those like us.”

Of course, part of being “like us” is making money without getting our hands dirty. This pulls minorities in to do that work. Rural communities in Georgia find that they have to make room for the people that clean their chicken coops. They may still be dominated by the Caucasians that retire to attend the Evangelical mega-church, but there’s nobody waiting in the wings to replace them. Sooner or later, the population will tilt to homogeneity.

In California, the end game has been apparent for twenty years. Having no other haven in the state, the majority fled out of the state to Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and further. What has been unnoticed is the electoral calculus of that movement.

Remember, these are the people most committed to maintaining white hegemony. In fleeing to low population states, they are assisted in that aim by electoral math: each of the 15 million voters in California elects two senators, just as each of the 500,000 voters in Montana. In terms of senatorial power, each voter in Montana has 30 times as much power as a voter in California. In the electoral college, each voter in Montana has 3 times as much power as a voter in California.

So this explains why the Republicans are ceding the House of Representatives to the Democrats in the midterm elections. In the House, every voter has equal power, and the will of the majority will rule. The Republicans will continue to cater to the ethno-nationalists to maintain control of the Senate. With control of both the Senate and the White House, they can continue to stuff the Judiciary with economic and religious conservatives.

I can’t imagine that the Founders envisaged this reality. Mass migration in their age brought social dislocation that disrupted political cohesion. In our age, communications and transportation infrastructure sustain political cohesion, an opportunity that the ethno-nationalists are exploiting to their advantage.

Jesus accepts your fascination with Death, and recognizes that Death asserts its sway over you in our consumer society. But he also understands that your fascination is locked in the weapons that you worship, so that when you die it evaporates when the metal is reclaimed for something useful – like making surgical implements or machine fasteners.

Eventually part of you will get to heaven, but it will only be the part that “fears not,” as the Bible commands so many times.

Jesus forgives your fear, but is determined that it be separated from you so that you may enter heaven. That is the measure of his love for us.

As the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold Trump’s Muslim travel ban, my colleague at work mused (jokingly) that he was prepared to leave the country if they opened interment camps.

Given that the people I would really like to see interred are the racist ethno-nationalists, I tripped down the road to the realization that they are. They have bought weapons and fenced off compounds, claiming sovereignty on the grounds that their closely-held freedoms are violated by the modern welfare state.

The question is whether we can create some kind of financial incentive to speed the process of self-interment. Maybe relief from the Obama-care mandates? Or maybe we could dam some portion of the Mississippi river, flooding the basin for Richard Thiel’s “one-man, one-island”-state.

Considering the challenges that God has in loving unconditionally, and interpreting the universe as a tool for that expression

So today, if you don’t mind, I’m going to talk about the Bible.

I know – the Bible has a bad reputation. It’s certainly not an easy read – even without pictures, it’s 1000 pages in tiny printing, and nearly 2000 pages in a print that I can read. I shouldn’t complain, though. It starts at the beginning of everything and runs through to the very end. Maybe 2000 pages isn’t enough.

If that wasn’t mind-blowing enough, nobody ever stepped in to make sure that the writing holds together. In part, that’s because the stories and ideas come from many ancient cultures – a creation story from Sumer, fire-god teaching from Persia, Hebrew oral history and Greek philosophy. Writing was just being invented, and dictionaries didn’t exist.